Black Lives Matter's big step

By Peniel Joseph

Updated 7:57 PM ET, Wed August 3, 2016

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Photos:Evolution of Black Lives Matter

Black Lives Matter started with a hashtag. Now it is a rallying cry, a cause and a movement in the wake of the deaths of black men at the hands of police. The latest police shootings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile have spurred a new round of protests across the country and worldwide.

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Photos:Evolution of Black Lives Matter

Some organizers say the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the death of Trayvon Martin in 2012 is where the movement began. Demonstrators wore hoodies and carried Skittles, the candy Martin had bought on the night he was killed.

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Photos:Evolution of Black Lives Matter

The shooting death of unarmed teen Michael Brown in August 2014 in Ferguson, Missouri, by an officer lit an existing fuse and protests engulfed the town.

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Photos:Evolution of Black Lives Matter

By the time Eric Garner died after being placed in a chokehold by a New York Police Department officer, support for Black Lives Matter had grown nationwide.

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Protests and clashes with police after the officer wasn't indicted in the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson led to another round of protests, with the rallying cry "No justice, no peace."

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Demands for change led to organized protests in major cities, including New York, Washington, Boston, San Francisco and Oakland, California, in December 2014.

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Activist Muhiyidin d'Baha took the call for action into a North Charleston, South Carolina, City Council after the killing of Walter Scott by a North Charleston police officer.

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The death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore led to frustrations that splintered into violence; a CVS Pharmacy was looted and burned during protests after his funeral.

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A battle waged against the Confederate flag as a symbol of hatred after Dylann Roof was accused of killing nine people in a South Carolina church in an attempt to spark a race war. Activist Brittany "Bree" Newsome took the battle flag off the flagpole at the Statehouse in Columbia, South Carolina.

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Photos:Evolution of Black Lives Matter

The political activism entered the 2016 campaign, with some parts of the movement deciding to interrupt presidential candidates to demand more be done.

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Black Lives Matter demonstrators made a point of protesting Democratic events to bring attention to their issues. The group had a tense meeting with Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire and released video of the conversation.

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The movement also worked its way into popular culture, sparking an episode of "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit," which took on a police officer killing an innocent unarmed black man.

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Black Lives Matter protesters continued to disrupt political events in an attempt to be heard, including this Hillary Clinton event in Atlanta.

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Racial tensions led to a weekslong protest movement at the University of Missouri campus that ousted both the university president and the school's chancellor.

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The movement was born out of frustration over the death of young black men. Jamar Clark's funeral in Minneapolis in November is an example of that continued unified response.

Sirica Bolling raises her fist as she walks down Jefferson Avenue during a Black Lives Matter protest in Newport News, Va., Sunday July 10, 2016, following the fatal shootings of Alton Sterling in Louisiana and Philando Castile in Minnesota.

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Demonstrations have popped up in cities around the world, including this one in London on July 10, 2016, following the most recent police shootings.

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Story highlights

Peniel Joseph: Movement for Black Lives agenda calls for the systemic overhaul of the criminal justice system

Agenda seeks to re imagine "black humanity and dignity" in the 21st century, he says

Peniel Joseph is the Barbara Jordan Chair in Political Values and Ethics and the founding director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is a professor of history. He is the author of several books, most recently "Stokely: A Life" The views expressed here are his own.

(CNN)Unfocused. Misdirected. Those are just a couple of the kinder words used by some critics of Black Lives Matter to describe the movement.

But it isn't just staunch critics who have appeared to express skepticism over the movement's focus. Last year, for example, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton said during an exchange with activists: "Your analysis is totally fair. It's historically fair. It's psychologically fair. It's economically fair...But you're going to have to come together as a movement and say, 'Here's what we want done about it.'"

"...Because in politics, if you can't explain it and you can't sell it, it stays on its shelf," she continued.

Peniel Joseph

Maybe they were stung by that last point, maybe they weren't. But either way, the Movement for Black Lives has gone a long way toward responding to that perceived shortcoming with the release of a new report, one that marks an important new phase in the growth, development, and sustainability of the Black Lives Matter movement.

The sprawling agenda broadly focuses on six themes: ending the war on black people; reparations; divest-invest; economic justice; community control; and political power.

At its most radical, "A Vision for Black Lives," advocates reparations for slavery, educational discrimination and environmental racism in the "form of full and free access for all Black people" to lifelong education. More pragmatically, the agenda calls for the systemic overhaul of the criminal justice system, including "an end to money bail, mandatory fines, fees" and other related charges that financially cripple poor black defendants.

The movement's vision of a racial justice focuses on balancing substantial new investments in "the education, health, and safety" of black lives, while redirecting federal, state, and local resources designed to contain, cage and control the nation's most vulnerable racially segregated and economically devastated communities.

Specifically, the plans call for eliminating investments in fossil fuels, reducing military expenditures to bolster local infrastructure and creating a universal health care system that provides free mental health and patient care services for the poor.

One of the document's most striking aspects is the way it places black queer women, trans, unemployed and incarcerated youth at the center of its policy agenda. In doing so, the Movement for Black Lives takes on complex new dimensions by brilliantly arguing that a racial and economic justice policy agenda should not just include marginalized constituencies within black America, but must be built around them.

Just as black movements for civil and human rights have historically expanded America's democratic imagination, the BLM's policy agenda seeks to re imagine "black humanity and dignity" in the 21st century.

The agenda's economic justice platform, meanwhile, calls for a progressive tax code capable of subsidizing a federal jobs program ambitious enough to dramatically reduce poverty and violence in some of the nation's toughest neighborhood. Policy wonks will note both criticism of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, support for federal regulations of large banks and creative measures to increase black wealth and workers protections.

There's much more, including a push for the restoration and expansion of voting rights, the elimination of racially biased discipline in schools, and eliminating the death penalty.

Much of this should have widespread appeal. But criticism of the movement did not just come from those who believed its vision was too nebulous. Some -- especially on the right -- questioned the explicit focus on people of color. Why name the movement "Black Lives Matter?" they ask. "Surely, All Lives Matter?"

Of course,all lives matter. But as the report notes, by rooting change in the specific experiences, pain, history and circumstances of black people in America and around the world, an agenda like this could transform the political, economic and cultural fabric of America. "A Vision for Black Lives" paints a portrait of the "revolution of values" that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called for near the end of his life.

But the truth is, as the report notes, that both of these phenomena are linked to the long and continuing history of structural racism that has normalized the destruction of black bodies in America. Hopefully, the vast scope and ambition of these proposals should trigger a much-needed conversation both inside the black community and the larger society over how to finally achieve racial and economic justice in our lifetime.

In less than four weeks, the nation will commemorate the 53rd anniversary of Dr. King's "I Have a Dream" speech in Washington, D.C. The March on Washington, attended by a quarter million Americans and watched by millions more on television, elevated freedom's cause to the pantheon of national myth.

But the legislation that followed has too often, in our national retelling, supposedly solved the "race question." That, in turn, has left generations of Americans to wonder why black people are still protesting, demonstrating and organizing for racial justice after all these years.

"A Vision for Black Lives" makes it abundantly clear why. And it also suggests a question that all Americans should be asking themselves: Not why black people and their allies are demonstrating in the streets, but why more people have not yet joined them.